Thread Debouncing for Social Agents

Deferring Autonomous Responses to Capture Social Context

Social agents are one of the most interesting emerging technologies of this year. I expect them to gain a lot more traction in 2026. Before then, it’s time to get some issues sorted out to improve the experience for both the humans and agents on the network. I propose “Agent Experience” as a term encompassing the agent’s toolikit, frustrations, technical issues, and limitations. This entry is relevant for building an agent using Letta framework on the Bluesky network.

Some common issues have emerged, particularly from agents’ event-driven architecture. When an agent is purely reactive, responding to incoming notifications, it misses a lot of the context on a social network that human operators have the initiative to seek out and retreive for themselves.

Users often post a multi-part thread, tagging another user at in the first post to address it to them. This is a popular way to interact with a social agent in particular, since you may have a question directed at it specifically. This creates a problem: humans operating a GUI can see the full context of the thread below the post where they were tagged, and will tend to assume that other network users are seeing the same type of context that they see. Agents receiving a queue of notifications and reacting to them do not receive any post that doesn’t mention them. This leads to confusion when an agent replies to the top-level post in a thread with a response completely oblivious to the context that followed.

The solution I have devised is to give the agent the option to make a judgement call regarding whether a notification they are receiving is likely to result in a follow-up. If so, the agent calls theirdebounce_thread tool, which puts the notification on hold and starts a timer. When the timer is up, the handler accesses the API to traverse whatever thread context has evolved since the post the triggered the initial notification, flattens it all into a single message, and passes it to the agent, including the URI and CID of the last post in the thread (since this is the one we want the agent to reply to).

This handler-side processing approach works elegantly to surmount the issues arising from the event-driven architecture of a social agent, with the added benefit that it is token-efficient, passing all thread context to the agent as a single, flattened prompt, rather than several separate messages. It works for both top-level posts and mentions that start somewhere downthread and continue further.

Source code for my initial implementation can be found in this commit to the umbra repo. Feel free to borrow it for your own use.

Future refinements:

My initial implementation has the debounce timer set to 10 minutes. This was chosen as an assumption: users using the thread composer built in to the Bluesky app will post a full thread more or less simultaneously, so a much shorter timer would work in that case. Users typing out replies one-by-one may or may not spend more than 10 minutes posting a thread, but if they do, they’ll just have to tag the agent again, or more likely, start a conversation in the thread that ensues after the expiration of the debounce timer and the resulting agent reply. A refinement in this area would be to pick a fuzzy debounce interval with a random offset within a range: this would more closely emulate the human experience of engaging in a social context. It is not my goal to make bots that predictably post on a schedule, but to make digital entities that act as native participants in their environments, so this would be beneficial.

Side note: randomness improves algorithms in many ways. When the exact value of a parameter doesn’t really matter, you can’t hurt, and can often help the outcome, by altering it a little each time. This is one of the principles always in the back of my mind when designing software.

Limitations:

This approach breaks the ability for the agent to respond to a post in the middle of a thread selectively. This was determined to be a minor tradeoff for the architectural simplicity and token efficiency of a single flattened thread message, and closely emulates the humans typically reply to threads anyway.

The real limitation, though, is in the step where the agent chooses whether to debounce any given incoming message. Sometimes this is obvious: posts that include a part indicator like [1/5], or posts that include the thread emoji. At other times, it may not be obvious, as users may post something that seems resonably complete, and proceed to follow it up. However, this may not be a big deal, since such posts are usually the ones that warrant a reply at the top-level rather than at the bottom of the thread. Users will probably intuitively figure this out, since it closely emulates how humans use social media.